Tyler Reese

Even without the juice he brought to a wrestling match--grunting and brandishing his chest like a savage or selling another wrestler's holds with guttural anguish, hips thrust up in the air--and even without the miniscule loincloth that flaunted his fish-belly-white butt cheeks and the longest iliac furrow known to science--even without these things, "Tarzan" Tyler Reese could make me grab my balls and whimper.  But with these things tacked on top of the rest, he makes me clutch my balls AND run in circles like a three year old who has to pee.

Not a wrestler most people think of first when discussing BG East, Reese, 5'8",  180#, is nevertheless one of my favorites.  The last of his BGE combats came out a couple of years ago, post Tarzan gimmick, but my favorite matches are the couple of Ringwars he did back to back (10 and 11), wrestling Ricky Martinez and Cole Cassidy.  Tyler must have been in his mid-twenties then, but he had the puckish face of a naughty child, with the pale vigorous body of a trapezist.  Cassidy and Martinez were particularly well matched to Reese in size and weight, but during the five years Reese worked at BG East, he also took on Kieran Dunne, Damien Heller, Mike Martin, Joe Driver, and Brendan Byers.  If Reese was not the best technical wrestler on the roster, he most certainly was one of the fastest, sexiest, and gamest.

He was also fearless.  Name another wrestler who would have worn that tenuous loincloth, for instance--not only wear it, but, throwing caution (and constraint) to the wind, exert himself with dynamic pro-wrestling moves like body slams and clotheslines, sometimes springboarding off the top ropes.  In that gear most other wrestlers would have been self-conscious and guarded almost to the point of immobility.  In one match, Tyler leaps up, snatches Ricky Martinez's head between his thighs, and slaps the guy, ass end up, to the mat, and then picks him up for an airplane spin before finishing him.  Pow! 

Then, too, I am a sucker for the Tarzan gimmick.  I only wish that six or seven years ago Kid Leopard would have mortgaged his house in Florida to shoot a feature-length jungle adventure starring Reese, with the Boss himself in the role of the villain, a greedy ivory hunter, whose henchmen, Marcelo Muscle, Cassidy, Aryx Quinn, and Joshua Goodman, Reese ambushes while they are skinny-dipping, in a climactic underwater fight to the death.  The whole thing could have been shot nearby at Silver Springs, where the great underwater Tarzan-Jane nude ballet was shot for M-G-M's 1934 Tarzan and His Mate.  I can have my dreams, can't I?

Missed opportunities, BG East, missed opportunities.